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I strongly disagree. There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email. All emails should of course contain enough information

I strongly disagree. There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email. All emails should of course contain enough information to make it clear who the message is from, why the message is being sent, and who it was sent to. But there is no point in adding unsubscribe links to messages and notifications that are essential to the service. I mean, what are you going to do if the user accidentally clicks "unsubscribe", and then a payment doesn't go through? Should you just cancel their account without informing them? That's absurd. I'd be really pissed if eg. my backups were deleted because I accidentally unsubscribed from emails from a cloud service provider.

mgkimsal 5y ago
> There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email. Agreed. rsync alluded to it below as well. 'unsubscribe'... from what? If I just bought something from service ABC, and I get an email from ABC saying "you just bought foo from us"... what would an 'unsubscribe' even mean? "Do not ever email me about this purchase again?" "Do not ever email me about future purchases?"
- thesimon 5y ago
  > Do not ever email me about this purchase again Please send me the order, just don't send me the PDF invoice :)
  - cdot2 5y ago
    This actually does cause problems with blocked password resets and things
    - tomerv 5y ago
      If I request a password reset, that constitutes an approval to send me that email.
      - mgkimsal 5y ago
        how do you know it's 'you' that requested it? if I requested a password reset to your email... is it spam?
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        And if I didn't request a password reset ... I'd like to hear about it.
      - cdot2 5y ago
        Some systems might just block all outgoing emails to anyone who has clicked unsubscribe which would block password resets as well
berdon 5y ago
What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this. My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.
- newaccount74 5y ago
  That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them. Ideally you should just be able to reply to the message and tell them about the error. If there's no way to contact a company, that's a whole different problem, and not really one that would be fixed with unsubscribe links in important email messages.
  - berdon 5y ago
    In 99% of the cases - there is no recourse. In one instance, I tried replying and they asked me to prove my identity as the customer to cancel the emails.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      I have a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards for an Australian store received as gifts over several years. The company won’t talk to me, and the sender sends a lovely message, but no contact information.
    - pishpash 5y ago
      This, I've had people receiving bank alerts for an account they don't own and they can't be stopped. What these companies lack are customer-centric processes that they've thought through. Wtf is wrong with putting contact information in the unsubscribe link, or reach out productively on request? Why would you presume somebody clicks it by accident vs. the much more likely case of it being a legitimate request? Are you afraid they really want to cancel your service? Or are you afraid you can't send spam under the guise of transactional messages? Or worse, listen to customers about how best to alert them? Truly ridiculous!
oblib 5y ago
Yeah, I run my own email server and have the same issues with the same services as the person who wrote the piece this links to. In my case users are sending estimates and invoices and monthly statements to their clients and while fake invoices may be a spammer thing those clients know who's sending them an invoice, and why and what for, so an 'Unsubscribe" link would be completely out of context because they are not subscribed to any email list. I've had the same domain name for over 20 years now and none of my users have ever used my apps to send spam. And as spam and email volume go my server isn't even close to sending out a lot of email. When I set up a new email server last year, with a new IP address, I had to go through the process of getting white listed. All the big email service providers have ways to do that. Google made it very easy. They gave you a unique string to add it to your DNS records and that's it. Microsoft is so convoluted I've still not gotten anywhere with them. Comcast and others had a few hoops and ladders but nothing that got me stuck. Personally, while it's a bit of a PITA to setup and manage an email server, it's been worth it. I used "Mail-in-a-Box". It's pretty easy to set one up with that. It has a built-in DNS server and that's a really great thing to have for managing several domain names and as many email addresses as you want. I've setup email accounts for family and friends as well as throwaways for my wife, who signs up for everything she sees on the internet. I can move the IP address of my email server to the top of the list in my Mac's System Preferences for DNS and start testing new domain names and changes to the DNS immediately. I don't have to wait for those to propagate to whatever my access provider is using. So I have 3 servers. An Email/DNS server, a database server, and a website/webapp server running on DigitalOcean's "Droplets". It's a bit of work for a small shop but it's much easier to manage once it's setup and I don't have to worry about any 3rd party service selling out or going under or changing their API to something entirely different. All of which has happened to me in the past.
tlogan 5y ago
We add link to accounts page to manage notifications - but we clearly say that certain notifications can be disable only by deleting the account. But even that does not help: some people just do not understand how to manage their email: they will consider as “spam” any email they receive and they cannot act on it immediately. Like storage quota reached, cc expired, or similar. There is some strange feeling that if they ignore the email and mark it as spam that the problem will magically disappear. We have so many cases like that: and they then contact us with questions like “why my service is not working” etc. I bet Netflix has same issues…
snowwrestler 5y ago
You guys are thinking way too literally and rigidly about this. Unsubscribe in a transactional email does not need to be an automated stop. Just have it open a support ticket and then follow up to find out why they clicked unsubscribe. If they are an established customer, it is legal to do that in all jurisdictions, even under GDPR. It’s much better than having a customer mark it as spam, as some people will definitely do if they can’t see how to unsubscribe.

mgkimsal 5y ago

> There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email. Agreed. rsync alluded to it below as well. 'unsubscribe'... from what? If I just bought something from service ABC, and I get an email from ABC saying "you just bought foo from us"... what would an 'unsubscribe' even mean? "Do not ever email me about this purchase again?" "Do not ever email me about future purchases?"

thesimon 5y ago
> Do not ever email me about this purchase again Please send me the order, just don't send me the PDF invoice :)
- cdot2 5y ago
  This actually does cause problems with blocked password resets and things
  - tomerv 5y ago
    If I request a password reset, that constitutes an approval to send me that email.
    - mgkimsal 5y ago
      how do you know it's 'you' that requested it? if I requested a password reset to your email... is it spam?
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      And if I didn't request a password reset ... I'd like to hear about it.
    - cdot2 5y ago
      Some systems might just block all outgoing emails to anyone who has clicked unsubscribe which would block password resets as well

berdon 5y ago

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this. My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

newaccount74 5y ago
That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them. Ideally you should just be able to reply to the message and tell them about the error. If there's no way to contact a company, that's a whole different problem, and not really one that would be fixed with unsubscribe links in important email messages.
- berdon 5y ago
  In 99% of the cases - there is no recourse. In one instance, I tried replying and they asked me to prove my identity as the customer to cancel the emails.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    I have a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards for an Australian store received as gifts over several years. The company won’t talk to me, and the sender sends a lovely message, but no contact information.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    This, I've had people receiving bank alerts for an account they don't own and they can't be stopped. What these companies lack are customer-centric processes that they've thought through. Wtf is wrong with putting contact information in the unsubscribe link, or reach out productively on request? Why would you presume somebody clicks it by accident vs. the much more likely case of it being a legitimate request? Are you afraid they really want to cancel your service? Or are you afraid you can't send spam under the guise of transactional messages? Or worse, listen to customers about how best to alert them? Truly ridiculous!

oblib 5y ago

Yeah, I run my own email server and have the same issues with the same services as the person who wrote the piece this links to. In my case users are sending estimates and invoices and monthly statements to their clients and while fake invoices may be a spammer thing those clients know who's sending them an invoice, and why and what for, so an 'Unsubscribe" link would be completely out of context because they are not subscribed to any email list. I've had the same domain name for over 20 years now and none of my users have ever used my apps to send spam. And as spam and email volume go my server isn't even close to sending out a lot of email. When I set up a new email server last year, with a new IP address, I had to go through the process of getting white listed. All the big email service providers have ways to do that. Google made it very easy. They gave you a unique string to add it to your DNS records and that's it. Microsoft is so convoluted I've still not gotten anywhere with them. Comcast and others had a few hoops and ladders but nothing that got me stuck. Personally, while it's a bit of a PITA to setup and manage an email server, it's been worth it. I used "Mail-in-a-Box". It's pretty easy to set one up with that. It has a built-in DNS server and that's a really great thing to have for managing several domain names and as many email addresses as you want. I've setup email accounts for family and friends as well as throwaways for my wife, who signs up for everything she sees on the internet. I can move the IP address of my email server to the top of the list in my Mac's System Preferences for DNS and start testing new domain names and changes to the DNS immediately. I don't have to wait for those to propagate to whatever my access provider is using. So I have 3 servers. An Email/DNS server, a database server, and a website/webapp server running on DigitalOcean's "Droplets". It's a bit of work for a small shop but it's much easier to manage once it's setup and I don't have to worry about any 3rd party service selling out or going under or changing their API to something entirely different. All of which has happened to me in the past.

tlogan 5y ago

We add link to accounts page to manage notifications - but we clearly say that certain notifications can be disable only by deleting the account. But even that does not help: some people just do not understand how to manage their email: they will consider as “spam” any email they receive and they cannot act on it immediately. Like storage quota reached, cc expired, or similar. There is some strange feeling that if they ignore the email and mark it as spam that the problem will magically disappear. We have so many cases like that: and they then contact us with questions like “why my service is not working” etc. I bet Netflix has same issues…

snowwrestler 5y ago

You guys are thinking way too literally and rigidly about this. Unsubscribe in a transactional email does not need to be an automated stop. Just have it open a support ticket and then follow up to find out why they clicked unsubscribe. If they are an established customer, it is legal to do that in all jurisdictions, even under GDPR. It’s much better than having a customer mark it as spam, as some people will definitely do if they can’t see how to unsubscribe.